Churchland lab

Today for our journal club, Haley presented a paper by Melissa Saenz & Christoph Koch: “The sound of change: visually-induced auditory synesthesia“. This paper was very novel in that it is the first to explore the phenomenon of synesthesia for vision and audition. This was of particular interest to us since we study multisensory integration using auditory and visual stimuli. The paper was an important heads-up for us: the synesthetes in the study performed far, far better than controls on a single-sensory task, presumably because they experienced multisensory benefits that the control subjects didn’t. Our subjects might likewise benefit from such an advantage so thinking about how this plays into our results could be potentially important.

We followed the journal club with a bordeaux-style tasting (French and California) to see if anyone had any kind of taste-related synesthesia. No one did, but we all enjoyed the wine nonetheless.